always look for water. We know the seaside or a lake shore will be coolest and will give us most fun. All people since the world began have loved water and built their homes near it. The earth is loveliest where there is plenty of blue, clear water.

America is greatly blessed with water. Our seacoasts are so long that we could spend all the summers of our lives playing on different parts of the shore.

Our rivers are many and varied. We have giant rivers, hundreds of miles long; we have rivers full of rushing waterfalls; we have little rivers, gentle and charming.

And lakes - there never was such a country as ours, for lakes and ponds! First come the "Great Lakes," on our north. They are like smaller oceans, only not salt. Lake Superior is the biggest lake in the whole world.

Then come all sizes of lakes, in forests and valleys and on mountains. If Daddy takes us on a camping trip through New England, there is not a night we cannot pitch tent by a lovely lake. Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont are dotted over with gleaming lakes set in the deep green of forest and field. Wisconsin and Minnesota, west of the Mississippi, are also full of lake-jewels and forests. Florida has

silent, mysterious lakes where great tropical birds live and strange flowers grow.

Of all the lakes in the world none are more beautiful than the mountain lakes of our Western National Parks. One of these is called Crater Lake. It is in Oregon, and it is the deepest and bluest lake in the world. Its sides are mountain cliffs a thousand feet high and its water is two thousand feet deep. Famous travelers say that the colors of sunrise and sunset over Crater Lake are the most wonderful views they have ever seen.

Another wonderful mountain lake is Mirror Lake, in the State of Washington. Mirror Lake lies at the foot of mighty Mount Rainier, and between its blue waters and Mount Rainier's glaciers lie fifty miles so full of wild flowers that it is named Paradise Valley.

Our Government has made a National Park around Crater Lake and around Mount Rainier, and takes care of these beautiful places for you and me. We can camp and play there all summer if our fathers can take us there. The National Parks are among the riches America gives her children.

Besides water, people have always loved hills. Every country that has hills and mountains is glad of them. They are cooler than the plains, they let us

see farther, and they are fair to look at. Far away they are blue like the sea, and near they are green and interesting.

All up and down the east and west coast of the United States lie mountain ridges and big hills. And all about in parts of many States are smaller ridges and hills.

Those in the West are magnificent, as we have seen from Mount Rainier. Those in the East are charming and inviting. If you can spend a summer in the Green Mountains of Vermont or the White Mountains of New Hampshire, you will have ponds to play by, woods to camp in, and farms to get eggs and milk from.

These are just a few of the mountains and hills American boys and girls can climb and enjoy. It is nice to belong to a climbing club and take walks every Saturday if you live in a hilly country. The boys and girls of Switzerland make walking their national sport, and our American boys and girls like the same hardy outdoor life that Swiss children enjoy.

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XXII

S beautiful as hills, and as much loved by people

of every land, are woods. We cannot even think of a world without trees. How baked with sun it would be in summer, how raked with wind in winter! No homes for the birds, no roofs of green to rest our eyes!

Some trees belong to us here in America especially. They were born here, and are not found in Europe except where some one has carried the seeds or the plants from here.

The oldest living thing and the biggest living thing in all the world grows in America. It is the Giant Sequoia, the biggest tree on earth.

There are more than a million Sequoias in California towering into the clouds so far that the tall forest around is like shrubbery beside them.

These Sequoias are thousands of years old and they are still thriving and beautiful. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, the baby animals in the Sequoia forests played around the same trees that we see growing there now. Before Jesus' birth, before the Old Testament was written, one of these Sequoia trees in California was a tall straight sapling. This one, the oldest of all living things, is called the "General Sherman Tree."

After the Giant Sequoia, the king of our trees is the White Pine. King Pine holds his head in the sky so far above the rest of the forest that the other tree-tops seem like a floor beneath him. He flings his broad, flat branches out in big tents across the sky-line. Wherever he grows there is beauty. His needles make a spicy carpet in the woods, good to play on.

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The queen of our trees is the American Elm. New England children are brought up under its graceful,